It got much easier to see as soon as he and his riding stock had worked down a crumbling wall to the sandy bottom. Flood waters had scoured the center of the wash clean, save for the neatly defined hoofprints left by the bunch he’d been trailing. He wasn’t at all surprised to see they were all headed south, towards what had to be a nearby border now.
“Slick,” Longarm reluctantly grunted as he paused to change the Mexican saddle back to the sorrel mare for a spell. He watered both brutes again, forked himself into that hardwood saddle, and followed the spoor of the fugitives up the wash.
It was running north out of higher desert because the original peace treaty had set the border along the Gila River to the north. That had left things awkward for both countries before the Gadsden Purchase had drawn a new imaginary line, designed to leave the natural watershed of the east-west Gila to Uncle Sam and the Southern Pacific Railroad. But in point of fact, Mexico had wound up with the headwaters of many a desert stream running downhill to the north. It hadn’t been raining when they’d surveyed the Gadsden Purchase.
So this wandering wash he was following likely began as a dried-out mud puddle somewhere south of the border, but with any luck, it didn’t matter to Mexico anyway.
Longarm patted the sorrel’s neck and muttered, “Five will get you ten those banditos rode you and your palomino pal down this very wash the other way before we had all that rain.”
He glanced back to see their own hoofprints were adding a mighty clear picture to the ones they were following. Los rurales were no damned good, but they were skilled manhunters, and anyone could see a heap of likely prosperous Yanqui riders had come up this same fool wash without bothering anyone at the regular crossing.
He hummed a few bars of “Farther Along” as he rode on after the others, hoping their guide had some clear plan in mind.
It was almost as pleasant as a hot Denver day in July down here in the shadows cast by the high banks and thicker brush. No members of the cactus tribe could survive with their shallower roots spread in sand that got scoured about once a year, of course. But the water that lay deeper in the drying sand encouraged mesquite, ironwood, and hackberry, all of it greened out again as if it thought this was May, for Pete’s sake, and the critters that usually holed up in the summer daylight of the desert were acting frisky all about, which was sort of distracting, but meant nobody was sitting in ambush around the next bend, at least.
Cicadas buzzed, white-wings cooed, and woodpeckers hammered in the olive greenery to either side as big blue-gray dragonflies chased red-eyed cactus flies about like kids playing tag after school. Now and again a ground squirrel cussed him, and once he flushed a comical desert jackrabbit with impossible ears and a zigzag way of running that made Longarm suspect some of those buzzards high above. He knew one breed of desert hawk grew black feathers and held its wings out the same way as a harmless buzzard until it saw fresh meat on the move down below. This highly evolved desert held lots of such grim surprises for the unwary.
Longarm wasn’t all that surprised when they cut throughb some brush to see the sand ahead all trampled and strewn with dried scraps and the shit of man and beast. The remains of more than one cook-fire told Longarm this was where the border-patrolling rurales paused to brew some coffee out of sight of prying eyes. Los rurales were out to jump border raiders and truculent Indians, not vice versa.
You couldn’t make out any particular set of tracks across the abused stretch of wash. That meant a Mexican detachment, a big Mexican detachment, had been through here since the last rain. It was as likely a federale or army column as the usual rurale patrol. Longarm hurried on lest the usual evening patrol catch him admiring all the scattered sign down here.
He caught up with the sign of Harmony Drake’s bunch on the cleaner sand upstream. He followed it because he had to. But he still wondered what in blue blazes was supposed to prevent the next rurale patrol from Sonoyta from cutting and following such a blatant trail.
Then, less than an hour on, he saw how the hoofprints he’d been following led up the now-much-lower western wall of the wash. So he reined in, swapped saddles and packs again, and rode the mule up into the blazing rays of the setting sun.
It felt as if he was riding into an open fireplace, as late in the day as it was. He had to stare down to one side to make out the hoofprints the others had left in the caliche, etched almost black against salmon pink by the low sun.
They led him, just around sundown, back to that same desert trail, or one just like it, leading south from Sonoyta instead of towards such a nosy border town. Better yet, there were lots of other hoofprints headed both ways. It figured to be the main post road from the border town to the coast town of Puerto Periasco.
Longarm muttered, “Mighty slick!” as he reined south to follow, not the sign he could no longer read, but the road that had to lead much the same way. It was not only possible but likely the fugitives would part company with this well-beaten track before it led them past curious eyes on the main streets of Puerto Periasco. But there was no better place to catch a steamboat bound for the far horizon than the only seaport for many a dreary mile. The desert came right down to the sea, from the Colorado-Gila delta to the Rio Sonora to the distant south, and they were as good as caught if they tarried all that long in any part of Mexico. For los rurales could read, and there was a lot of bounty money posted for Harmony Drake.
As he rode at a trot in the gathering dusk, Longarm tried not to think about the Mexican reward posters offering handsome bounties on El Brazo Largo, muerto o vivo.
Which translated fairly tightly as “Longarm, dead or alive.”
Chapter 7
A couple of dark hours down the road, Longarm topped a rise to see lamplight ahead. A lot of lamplight ahead. Someone had lit up the front of a wayside ‘dobe structure as if they’d been expecting company.
Longarm wasn’t sure of his own reception. So he rode the sorrel and led the mule off to one side through the cactus and brush until he figured he’d be out of range of all that lamplight as he circled in for a look-see.
It only took a few minutes. Longarm tethered his stock and moved in afoot with the Big Fifty at port. Standing close to a far taller clump of organpipe, he could make out an anxious-looking older Mexican in the open doorway across the road. Sun-faded blue lettering across the buff adobe above the door and windows proclaimed the place to be afonda por coches or stagecoach stop. Longarm hadn’t known there was a coach line from Sonyata down to that steamboat line on the Sea of Cortez, but it made sense.
He decided it made more than sense as he slipped back to where he’d tethered his now sincerely jaded riding stock. The fondero in that doorway was obviously expecting a night coach to Puerto Periasco. His relay fonds was about ten or twelve miles south of the border. A stagecoach was called a stagecoach because it changed team in
